1) Paula Zahn had a chance to
challenge an affirmative action advocate about why she favors
preferences or how she reacts to the view that affirmative action
stigmatizes all blacks in the workplace. But instead Zahn opted for
tossing up liberal assumptions. For her "One on One with Paula
Zahn" segment on Saturday's (June 7) CBS Evening News, Zahn
profiled Johnnetta Cole, outgoing President of Spelman College.

A better question: Can you
imagine a time CBS reporters make even a token attempt at challenging
liberalism instead of promoting it?

2) In the wake of Susan
Molinari's jump to CBS News, the PBS NewsHour aired a discussion
Friday night of the revolving door. A NBC News executive argued that
1) It is okay to jump from politics to a network, as long as you are
behind the scenes; and 2) There's "no partisanship" in the
news.

"I think that I have no
reason to believe that Ms. Molinari can't learn the basics of
journalism, of clarity and fairness. We shouldn't be judging her
before the fact. But that's not where I think the problem lies. I
think that there really is an issue of the blurring of the lines and
that there shouldn't be such an easy exit from one arena to the other.
I wish that in her case there had been a period of, a cleansing if you
will, a purgatory, a time when she could prove that she really does,
is able to jettison her partisan background and act as a
journalist."

Later, David Gergen suggested
that "Tim Russert of NBC took time out and I think proved
himself."

Jim Lehrer jumped in:
"He took time out. He left Moynihan and what did he do, Ms.
Gould, he became the Washington bureau chief for NBC?"

Gould explained: "Prior
to that he was an executive in New York for several years helping to
run the news division."

COMMENT:
Russert, who worked for Senator Pat Moynihan and then for New York
Governor Mario Cuomo, jumped immediately from Cuomo's office to Vice
President of NBC News in 1984. So, by Gould's reasoning it is a more
serious threat to journalism to go directly from politics to hosting a
weekly show on the least newsy day of the week than it is to jump from
a politician's staff to a top executive position where you can
influence all network news shows.

Talk about image over
substance. As a behind the scenes person herself, who was the Senior
Producer of NBC Nightly News for many years, I'd think Gould would
have a better appreciation for how network news is more than who is
perky enough to be chosen to read Tele-Prompter copy written by
someone else.

At another point, Lehrer
pressed Gould: "But what about the Congressman's point that it
was a phony boundary; that there is partisanship already in the news,
and all this does is just make it a little more open and honest?"

Gould responded: "I
don't feel that there is partisanship in the news. I think that there
are -- is an attempt -- I mean, it is the basic tenet of journalism to
be fair, to be critical, to be watchdogs, and sometimes that means to
take unpopular positions with one side of the aisle versus the other.
But I think as an activist, as an elected official, it is very
difficult for the public to then think that you're now able to -- to
remove yourself from that debate and act as a journalist should."

COMMENT:
"To be fair." Let's see. Here's how Tom Brokaw introduced
America to the Contract with America on September 27, 1994:
"Today, GOP congressional candidates were summoned to Washington
and given a battle plan. However, as NBC's Lisa Myers tells us
tonight, it is long on promises and short on sound premises." On
March 22, 1995 Brokaw again distorted the Contract: "When NBC
Nightly News continues: In Washington, if they cut food stamps, who
doesn't eat?"

Here's an exchange from an
April 12, 1996 Today segment promoting a Dateline story on Oklahoma
City victims.

Bill Moyers: "They're
angry now that, most of the people who were killed were connected, in
one way or the other, to the federal government. They thought of
themselves as public servants. Then politicians and talk radio turned
them into faceless bureaucrats, and finally the terrorists turned them
into victims, and they're angry."

Bryant Gumbel: "You
mention talk radio. They have some very hard feelings about talk radio
and the hate being spewed by some of those on the far end of the
spectrum."

Moyers: "If anything,
talk radio in that part of the world is more anti-government today
than ever. The airwaves are saturated with hostility, it's just an
unremitting vilification of government. Sometimes it's, sometimes
it's, you know, the government makes mistakes and there are
justifiable grievances against government. But this is, this goes
beyond that, it's excessive. And these people take it like salt in the
wound. They drive around, they turn on their radio, they hear some
vicious attack on government, and they think, `You know, if you strike
the government, you kill my daughter.'"

When do Brokaw, Gumbel and
Moyers go in for a "cleansing"?

3) Al Hunt really hates
Gingrich and is enraged that Congressman Dan Burton might actually do
a little investigating. The latest mean-spirited shot from the Wall
Street Journal's Executive Washington Editor was uttered on the May 31
Capital Gang. Here's his Outrage of the Week, as transcribed by MRC
intern Jessica Anderson:

"House Speaker, Newt
Gingrich, is blatantly and unethically trying to use House
Appropriations Chairman Livingston and Judiciary Chairman Hyde to
intimidate the FBI in its investigation of sleazy fundraising
practices by Congressman Dan Burton. Burton is the miscast Chairman,
investigating Clinton fundraising improprieties. Imagine the screams
if the White House tried Gingrich's tactic. But then, why should this
surprise us coming from the only Speaker ever to be officially
sanctioned for unethical conduct."

Gee, can't we all just get
along?

4) Two Chicago Tribune
reporters warn that if the West fails to raise taxes on the rich it
will face another Hitler. Browsing the Tribune Web page, MRC news
analyst Clay Waters came across a Sunday, June 8 Perspective section
piece titled "Revolt of the Have-Nots: An Election Harbinger from
Europe?" Ron Grossman and R.C. Longworth, identified as
"Tribune staff writers," offered an explanation couched in
Marxist language as to why conservatives lost:

"A little
belt-tightening now will yield a feast of future prosperity, the
French and British conservatives promised. A lot of voters, though,
seemed to have noticed that the unemployment rolls have been growing
even as international trade and corporate profits have been
increasing. So they translated the politicians' equation into a
question: 'We should do with even less so you can profit even more?'

And off they went to the
polling places, thumbing their noses at the status quo. The late
communist poet and avant-garde playwright Bertolt Brecht once
expressed the morning-after chagrin that the British and French
establishments now must feel for being so unappreciated by the
unwashed. Told that the East German people had lost confidence in
their political leadership, Brecht responded: 'Then the Party will
have to elect a new people.'

"In democracies, of
course, that's not easily done. That pesky little thing called the
vote allows the least of the have-nots to throw a monkey wrench into
the best-laid schemes of plutocrats and technocrats every election
day."

Observing that in the West a
social bargain was struck long ago in which "life's winners have
an obligation to help the losers," the reporters insisted that's
now falling apart:

"All that has been
changed by the emergence of a global economy. Suddenly, a lot more
losers exist. In the U.S., the gap between the rich and the poor is
greater now than at any time since the 1920s, and greater than in any
other industrial country. The theory of a trickle-down effect was one
of the first casualties of the new economic order. Inequalities of
wealth used to be justified on the assumption that some of the crumbs
from the groaning tables of the wealthy drizzle down on the classes
below. But in an age of global markets, the rains in Spain (or the
U.S., etc.) often fall on some other country's plain."

The solution: Global
government cooperation to make sure anyone who succeeds cannot escape
confiscatory taxes. While the "well-heeled" have been able
to avoid taxes, workers "have been increasingly financing their
own safety net -- in a case of robbing Peter to pay Peter. But there
is only so much money to be made in soaking the poor."

Grossman and Longworth argued
that "any government...that loses the power to tax loses the
power to compensate life's also-rans. If the new governments of
Britain and France try to increase corporate taxes to sustain the
welfare state -- which is what got them elected -- they could
precipitate an even greater scramble for overseas tax havens. Indeed,
unless nations work collectively to tax the winners in a global
economy and force them to reassume their social responsibilities,
these left-wing governments might just prove to be political
way-stations.

"They could be succeeded
by other nastier regimes, responding to workers' demands to stop a
Brave New World they want to get off of. More than a half-century ago,
Hitler and Mussolini seemed to offer their peoples a respite from
history.

The Windy city duo concluded
with this ominous warning:
"As David Marquand, a British political scientist, has noted, the
Western nations soon may face just such a choice between their most
hallowed political traditions and contemporary economic forces.
'Either democracy has to be tamed for the sake of the market,'
Marquand has written, 'or the market has to be tamed for the sake of
democracy.'"

"A special presidential
commission is recommending that Congress enact a law that prohibits
creation of human beings by cloning until more is known about the
safety and ethics of the procedure. We'll have more on the cloning
debate in a few minutes, here on Today."

The previous story had
nothing to do with Davis and neither did the next. Tuesday Davis faces
a four-man Republican primary in Virginia to win the Republican
nomination for Attorney General. A few clones might help his chances.

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